Where The Blue Really Begins and Never Ends
I saw General George S. Patton leading the troops in from maneuvers . He was on a dappled grey horse, his campaign hat set squarely on his head, the ivory handled revolvers evident on his belt. This was at Ft. Meade, Maryland, where according to my friend General James T. Hill, U.S. Army Rtd., Patton was a colonel and commander of the fort and the 3rd Cavalry. I should have realized that a country playing war games was actually preparing for war. In my defense, I was only five years old.
Within a year, I would travel with my parents, Sgt. and Mrs. Frank L. Kersnowski, to Hawaii. My father was stationed at Tripler General Hospital, which was then in its original site at Ft. Shafter. Dressed for the tropics, we arrived by ship to be greeted by the family sharing our large duplex on base.// Happily, they came with leis, and so began our idyll, one not unusual for those halcyon days between the wars: kid stuff of trying to rescue baby myna birds, wading in ponds, going to school wearing my shoes and coming home carrying them; grown up stuff of my mother taking hula lessons and working at the px while my father walked up the hill to the hospital where he was mess sergeant. Then there were parties and picnics at beaches, swimming at Waikiki, unsuccessfully fishing for angel fish, being admonished for blowing a whistle during a coordinated swimming display at the opening of a new hotel; seeing my parents leave for a New Year’s Eve dance at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and seeing films of their grown up adventures to the big island of Hawaii. //
Though tame by comparison, this life was not different from that of Larry and his family on Corfu. Wars were in earlier times and different places. We existed in a sunny lull that we were soon to call the between the wars period. Again, in my defense, I was very young and could not be expected to understand that armies are like loaded guns and will have to be fired sometime. Even in the letters between Miller and Durrell, neither took the growing military goals of Germany seriously, not until they had to pack up and leave: Miller back to the United States where he would abandon his expat status if not its bohemian ways; and Durrell would drift steadily south until he lost both wife and his expat status and began his search for a new home.
How we got to our halcyon islands is not at all similar. Mine was simple: my father got transferred, and I being only five years old went with him and my mother to Hawaii, a fortunate choice since this was 1940, and their other choice was Manila. My mother and I, if we had gone to Manila, would have been shipped out with the other dependents a week before the attack on Pearl. But my father would have stayed. Many who stayed did not come home.
But how Lawrence Durrell went to Corfu and why it became a touchstone for him during difficult and unpleasant times is quite complex. Not only is what he wrote while on Corfu is important in understanding the writer, but also how he evoked that time and place for years to come figures complexly and passionately into his being.
Having been sent to England at the age of twelve to be schooled, he would not leave until he was 23—except for brief asides to the Continent.// The trips offered him a view of life quite different from that in England, which he christened “Pudding Island”. In 1935, he and Nancy, newly married, left for Corfu, accompanied by his sister Margo; the rest of the family would follow. He would never again live in England, except briefly. His first novel, The Pied Piper of Lovers indicates clearly why he did not return. This novel is a pastiche of faux Kipling, faux Orwell, and faux anyone else he thought would attract a publisher and win him an audience willing to buy. Clearly autobiographical, The Pied Piper of Lovers offers irrefutable proof to that old chestnut of writing: everyone has one novel in him (or clearly her as well). But that being said, no one can guarantee that novel will be worth reading. As Durrell said on hearing it had been accepted, and would repeat, the novel was not good. In fact, he refused to have it reprinted. And here I agree with his view that it was not worth reprinting except for scholarly reference, and take mild exception to the view taken by James Gifford who edited the reissue, that Durrell found it embarrassingly too autobiographical.
The novel is best in the faux Kipling bits, evoking as they do India of the Raj and Durrell’s own recollection of his life there, as in this meeting with a native boy:
The small native boy seated upon the cracked mud plinth of the ruined
shrine greeted Walsh with a shout:
“Hai Mai! Chota sahib, you grow greater in girth each day. Is it the
curry they feed you on at the house?”
He wriggled his body about and clapped his hands softly laughing.
“Behold thine own body and judge,” said Walsh absently, for he was
not in a truculent mood and then, “From where do you come, small one?”
His smile was one of lofty patronage. He spat with gratifying expertise.
“Little one,” said the boy without anger. “Indeed, I am larger than you. Also I have drunk from many pitchers. I am no owlish Hillman that you should speak to me thus. See, if you will. I speak English:
‘If musick bee the food off love playon,
Giff me excess off it’’’
Walsh interrupted with a burst of laughter: “You speak like a babu with no thought of words. Do you know then what they mean?”
“No, mister,” said the boy in English.
“Neither do I,” Walsh admitted.
“It is all one,” and he flashed his teeth in a grin. (74-5)
Though faux Kipling is most evident here, so is part of Durrell’s indelible talent for voice. Here he is able to make us realize when Hindi or English is being spoken while writing only in English. Kipling, clearly, could do so, as could Hemingway. And Durrell always had a good ear. I once told him an anecdote in which a friend of mine said: “FK, why would you ever do something like that!” The voice J.P. Donleavy would have described as having “a good accent with a better one underneath,” except that the one I imitated was common with an affectation from some James Bond film. A few minutes after I told Larry my anecdote, he said in precisely the accent I spoke: “Fk, why would you ever do something like that”. I was startled, but he seemed unaware of his imitation. He was simply doing what he did so well. His travel books are rife with examples of the same knack. The difficulty with this example from The Pied Piper of Lovers is that the novel itself cannot match the quality of the dialogue, in this case and others.
By the time he began Panic Spring, his next novel, Durrell would have a good shaking out of much affectation by the example of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Of course, he was also out of England when he began writing his second novel. He and Nancy, along with his mother and three siblings, were living in Corfu. In all that happened to him in the next fifteen years, Corfu and Greece would be a psychic safe spot. Even though World War 2 would force him to leave, he would return for years in hopes of reliving that all too brief time of youth and peace. And even when he couldn’t return, he would write about that time. Understandably, as anyone who has been to Greece would say. And yes I’m sure Greece was different before the tour boats and when ouzo and retsina were made locally. But much that he treasured is still there.
“I tell them they should learn English. And they say: ‘Why should I learn English to drive a cab. If I know English, I can teach at the university”. Durrell would have recognized and loved the Greeks who said this. With Durrell’s The Greek Islands as a tour guide, off we went on the Zeus II, a 120 foot motor sailer, for a week afloat in the Cyclades. The seemingly practical, yet wildly impractical, response to my request for a cab to take us on a brief tour of Paros was neither atypical nor infrequent. As Durrell found, the Greeks are so hospitable as to seem innocent, as was the case with the English speaking cab driver who gathered an armload of fresh wild herbs that made the kitchen fragrant for months or the woman who finally appeared to sell us a black dress in a street stall in Tinos (stealing the dress would have been far less trouble but unthinkable) or the man who left his shop to show us another piece of amber. We were then having dinner at a restaurant across from the Roman Agora, where St. Paul had spoken to the Athenians. No respecters of either the Athenians, St. Paul, or the ruins, cats prowled the Agora. Those who complain that Athens is dirty and polluted must have stayed within the air-conditioned belly of tour buses for large parts of their lives, leaving them only for the packaged comfort food readily available in unerring similarity the world over. Or perhaps they have spent their lives in the immaculate Paris Metro, doing nothing to annoy the oh so diligent gendarmes who keep Paris safe and will beat the bejesus out of those who would sully La Belle.
But to arrive in Athens, virginally unaware, is a shock: “Holy shit. That’s the Parthenon. And that’s the Temple of Zeus, right in the middle of the fucking city!” Give respect where due, but keep to your own language or as J.P. Donleavy’s Balthazar B said: “Swive the begrudgers”.// And if the ouzo and retsina are flowing, take your bandana in your hand and ask the captain of the stout Zeus II to dance. //Of course, this patois is very different from Durrell’s plumy voice, which stains with wit and wisdom everything he wrote, even some things I don’t like. And to leave Athens and see the Temple of Poseidon on the bluff at Sinon sink into what Homer called the wine dark sea is to understand that Durrell was even more accurate when for the opening sentence of Prospero’s Cell, he wrote: “Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins” (11). I know the blue he meant and never forgot, that would appear in his thoughts and writing when he found himself in places such as Los Angeles and Argentina, places he must have considered not only arid but able to suck the joy out of his life.
What Greece meant to Durrell and why he wrote about it as he did, we can view in two ways: by going to the places he went to and by turning the critical eye on how he wrote. Being a tourist or reading the travel books as holiday entertainment or to take one’s mind off the dentist will not work, and if the ventures seem like slogging along, as Yeats wrote about writing in his poem “Adam’s Curse,” all is for naught. Perhaps the ventures will not be like being in love, but they should be close as Durrell indicated in “10.4.37,” the first section of Prospero’s Cell: “It is a sophism to imagine that there is a strict dividing line between the waking world and the world of dreams. N and I, for example, are confused by the sense of several contemporaneous lives being lived inside us; the sensation of being mere points of reference for space and time” (11-12). Such is Durrell’s understanding of the perception of their existence he and his wife had as they arrived in Corfu. Partially, we can understand their state as that of two people in love, which brings with it the bright blue light of passion and the lighter blue of satiation, both of which have their own contemporaneous realities. Partially, we can understand Durrell’s view because he is reflecting on that past time, with the narrative as a journal he devised after the experience. Thus, we can see what stayed in his memory and, partially, understand the telling. Then, of course, we can go to Greece and see just how accurate he was, accepting if we will our own frail and challenged objectivity. We must, however, realize that as did Durrell writing Prospero’s Cell after he had settled in Alexandria in 1944 that we see the past as we wish. For Durrell, Prospero’s Cell is a paen to a lost time, a lost place, and a lost love. Clearly, he would have written a different book in a different time and place; for essential to his understanding is place or what he called Spirit of Place. And Durrell’s writing is always evocative of place not only as a physical entity but as one that shapes all who live in it, no matter how briefly. But place is never static. Move even slightly and understanding changes and memory plays a different tune on the heart’s chambers.
By the time he wrote Prospero’s Cell, Durrell was quite cognizant of the teaching of Freud and Einstein. Both of them confirmed him his view that experience is affected by perception, that objectivity is probably only a sop given uncharitably. Though deeply touched by such theory, Durrell found he could not consider love and the lover as symptoms. Even though his marriage with Nancy ended, the time of their marriage and their time in Greece stayed and not just in his recollection about six years later in Alexandria. She and that time appeared again when he wrote about Delos in The Greek Islands about forty years after “10.4.37”:
It was to Stephan [Syrotis] that I owe my first visit to Mykonos and, by
the same token, to Delos, where he made me free of two tiny beaches
which are still there, still untenanted. (235)
He rediscovered “this tiny corner in 1966, using the same technique that Stephan had show me in 1939” (235). Staying overnight on Delos is forbidden (now one may only stay for a few hours); so Durrell bribed a fisherman to drop him and his wives , sequentially, at the tiny beach with provisions and to collect them the next morning. Not content with only writing about that simple time of love, Durrell literally revisited his past, doing Hemingway one better than his return to Paris at the time of his first marriage with A Moveable Feast.
Perhaps, as some have noted, the dates Durrell gives to sections of Prospero’s Cell are simply randomly assigned. Then, too, they may have a significance he does not share, as with “the kisses four” in Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. When all the numbers, all the emotions, all the thoughts are at one’s finger tips to use, why not choose ones that matter, even if why they matter is never told. As Hemingway wrote In A Farewell To Arms, words like courage and honor are meaningless besides the numbers of roads, the names of places where men have fought and died. So too might be Keats’s “kisses four” or Durrell’s “10.4.37”. If such dates do not register as biographically or historically actual, they still offer us a specific reality. Perhaps, we can match such dates with ones we remember: when we fell in love, when we left youth and innocence, when we felt the pull of all that was lost.
Without doubt Ian MacNiven, Durrell’s biographer, is proper in reflecting that though Prospero’s Cell is the most “sunlit” of his island books. he does replay the past to a new tune: “In the book he resurrected his marriage to Nancy—‘N’ in the narrative—in idealized terms, painting her as the gentle and graceful figure that she could be, with no hint of their rages and tensions” (293-294). And yet or what if…all the stories of love found and lost could so begin. With love as deeply felt as Durrell’s for Nancy, I think he is not so much idealizing the love as asking why they couldn’t keep their “narrow style of loving” that he details for his readers in 17.5.37. In response to his Corfiot friend Theodore Stephanides’// question: “What is causality, Durrell provides not theory but the fact of a writer:
Causality is the dividing floor which falls away each morning when
I am back on the warm rocks, lying with my face less than a foot above the dark Ionian. All morning we lie under the red brick shrine to Saint Arsenius, dropping cherries into the pool—clear down two fathoms to the sandy
floor where they loom like drops of blood. N. has been going in for them
like an otter and bringing them up in her lips. The shrine is our private
bathing pool; four puffs of cypress, deep clean-cut diving ledges above two
fathoms of water, and a floor of clean pebbles. Once after a storm an icon
of the good Saint Arsenius was found here by a fisherman called Manoli,
and he built the shrine out of red plaster as a house for it. The little lamp
is always full of sweet oil now, for Saint Arsenius guards our bathing. (16)//
Durrell’s recollection of Nancy, their marriage and their love is testimony to why they were together. If he recalled the “rages and tensions,” lies and deceptions, rejections and indifferences, his answer as to why they were ever together would have been quite different. Such answers as the latter would underlie much of The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet. Yet he would return to the Greece they all lived, as would his brother Gerald.
Gerald Durrell appears to have been a naturalist from birth. At least his mother and siblings recall his interests from their earliest memories of him. Perhaps, he told of his interests in flora and fauna when he recalled then in connection with human animals, as he did most famously in his first book about the time the family loved on Corfu: My Family and Other Animals. He set in place the character (or caricature) of his family: Mother as a loving and somewhat dithering woman; Larry as a temperamental and overbearing brother; Leslie as a man obsessed with shooting and boating; Margo as a sister constantly preening before adoring men. Finding that he could continue such narratives, with and without his family, Gerald wrote 35 books, largely to support the zoo he established on the Chanel Island of Jersey.
When I asked Larry what he thought of his brother books about their time in Greece, he said: “He nicked all my best stories”. Perhaps he did, but the two brothers had quite different narratives. Gerald’s books are filled with the people of Corfu: peasants and wanderers, such as the Rose Beetle Man, a mute with whom Gerald bargained like a Greek to buy a tortoise or the beetles that flew around the man attached to him by strings,// Spiro Hakiaopulos, also known as Spiro American because he had spent eight years in Chicago:
That’s where I learnt my goods English…Wents there to makes moneys…
Then after eight years I says: “Spiro,” I says, “yous mades enough…”
sos I comes back to Greece…brings this car..best ons the islands… .(28-29)//
Spiro became their guide, protector, their banker until their money arrived; and he always found them the most lyrical of houses, though perhaps they only seemed so to Gerald as he remembered Greece with just as much rose tinted nostalgia as did his brother, as evidenced in this description of the first villa Spiro found for them:
Spiro was pointing at a gentle curve of hillside that rose from the glittering sea. The hill and the valleys around it were an eiderdown of olive-groves
That shone with a fish-like gleam where the breeze touched the leaves.
Half way up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival. (29)
If the Durrells had not settled in England after years in India, where all the children were born, coming “home” as the colonials British said, coming home in fact to a place and a people pallid , the lyrical relief in the brothers’ remembrances of Corfu might have been quite different. After all, they were not on holiday in Greece. They were running away from home.
If Gerald did, as his brother said, nick all his best stories, he did so after giving his older brother over fifteen years to write himself. What the writings of the two brothers indicate is a sharp difference in talent. The friends, family, the island itself were settings for Larry’s remembrance of Nancy and their marriage. Except for writing about Corfu as a geographical and historical place, he looks closely only at people whose lives and sophistication match theirs. Otherwise, he is a writer practicing recalling dialogue and character. A case in point:
Shooting rabbits on the island of Vido my brother records the
Following conversation with a man about to embark in a rowboat for the
Mainland.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘From the prison.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home. I get every week-end off.’
‘What is your sentence?’
‘A life sentence. I am a murderer.’
Lawrence’s only interest seems to be in the dialogue and in his commentary on the prison:
Vido was once nobly wooded; but the French cut down all the trees
In order to facilitate military operations. The prison is a pleasant white-
washed building standing back from the sea. The prisoners themselves
keep up a steady trade in little carved objects of wood and beaten metal;
workmanship of a stylized Byzantine kind, but sensitive and pleasant in its
crude way. (91-92)
This passage occurs in a chapter titled “History and Conjecture” and is not connected narratively to what occurs before or after. Actually, the only connections between the passages are that Durrell gives them dates. Later, the use of passages isolated from a central narrative will be important to him, forming touchstones with an external reality or providing a clue to the idea of the central narrative. Here, if there is an intent other than stringing bits together, Durrell is evoking what he called “Heraldic”: seemingly disparate images of a reality that cannot be expressed in a simple and straightforward statement. Clearly derived from heraldry, Durrell’s idea smacks of the conservatism of T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative”(quote). We have to be among those who share the values evoked by the images. Or as Yeats would have it, we have to be one of his school chums (quote). In any case, values are not explained, but must be understood. We will look often at the images, narratives, and values.
Gerald Durrell in writing about the same character and event does so to present his experience accurately and entertainingly. He meets Kosti (the convict) who gives him a very large, ill-tempered gull named Alecko. The gull is introduced into the villa that contains a veritable zoo (after numerous other attempts, Gerald will establish his permanent zoo on the Channel Island Jersey)//. Each family reacts as they have been developed as characters in My Family and Other Animals:
‘Well,’ observed Larry as we sat over dinner, ‘don’t blame me if the
House is hit by a cyclone. I’ve warned you; I can do no more.’
‘Why a cyclone, dear?’
‘Albatrosses always bring bad weather with them.’
‘It’s the first time I’ve heard a cyclone described as bad weather,’
Observed Leslie.
‘But it’s peacocks that are unlucky, dear; I keep telling you,’ Mother
said plaintively. ‘I know because an aunt of mine had some of the tail-feathers in the house and the cook died.’
‘My dear Mother, the albatross is world famous as a bird of ill-omen.
Hardened old salts are known to go white and faint when they see one. I
tell you, we’ll find the chimney covered with Saint Elmo’s fire one night,
and before we know where are we’ll be drowned in our beds by a tidal wave.’
‘You said it would be a cyclone,’ Margo pointed out.
‘A cyclone and a tidal wave,’ said Larry, ‘with probably a touch of
earthquake and one or two volcanic eruptions thrown in. It’s tempting
Providence to keep that beast.’
‘Where did you get him, anyway?’ Leslie asked me.
I explained about my meeting Kosti (omitting any mention of the
water-snakes, for all snakes were taboo with Leslie) and how he had given me the bird.
‘Nobody in their right senses would give somebody a present like
that,’ observed Larry. ‘Who is this man, anyway?’
Without thinking, I said he was a convict.
‘A convict?’ quavered mother. ‘What do you mean, a convict?’
I explained about Kosti being allowed home for the week-ends,
because he was a trusted member of the Vido community. I added that he and I were going fishing the next morning.
‘I don’t know whether it’s very wise, dear,’ Mother said doubtfully.’I
don’t like the idea of your going about with a convict. You never know what
He’s done.’
Indignantly, I said I knew perfectly well what he had done. He killed his wife. (174-275)
Though Gerald restructured the event for narrative appeal, this incident probably occurred much as he wrote it, with the notable addition of brother Larry to the mix. Actually, Larry lived quite a distance from the rest of the family with his wife Nancy, who never appears in My Family and Other Animals. The immediate family was quite enough to occupy readers, who bought this book and the more than thirty others written by Gerald Durrell.
Brother Gerald had a golden touch for writing books with wide popular appeal. Fortunately, since for some time, the royalties from his books kept the Jersey zoo solvent. He could create characters and narratives that were immediately known and enjoyed by his readers, though they were frequently one dimensional. Brother Larry is a good example: irascible and arrogant, the bohemian writer, who would have had to be much more complex if he had a wife. Though Brother Larry could write popular fiction, his talent rested more in his complex and brooding self. Fortunately, we have the above comparison to understand what he was likely to do.
Into this almost stable idyll fell two books: Tropic of Cancer and Panic Spring, which came soon after the publication of the quite dreadful Pied Piper of Lovers.
Nancy and Larry were settled in Corfu by the time the rest of the family arrived with news: Alan Thomas has forwarded to them Cassell’s acceptance of Pied Piper of Lovers. Durrell’s writing on his next novel, Panic Spring, would be interrupted by a friend, Barclay Hudson, loaning him a book: Tropic of Cancer. Probably, he had already manufactured his own version of how he came to have a copy of Tropic of Cancer: he fished it out of a public urinal, probably put there by an American tourist, dried it out, read it, and realized he was in the presence of genius//. To be a biographer would be to explain the duality of his understanding. To write of the fictive reality he often chose to inhabit, I simply say, he liked to make up stories and often he did so as well as anyone ever has. Reading Tropic of Cancer freed him from the influences that produced the pastiche that was Pied Piper of Lovers, though Miller’s influence was not impurely and simply in his best interests. But the importance of Miller and Tropic of Cancer is evident in the Durrell’s use of the name Van Norden, a character in Tropic of Cancer: he and Nancy named their sailboat The Van Norden, and Larry would publish Panic Spring under the pseudonym Charles Norden. By now he was with Faber and Faber, who requested he not use the same name that had appeared on the terrible and poorly sold Pied Piper of Lovers.
Corfu did provide Durrell with an alternative reality to Pudding Island, as did Tropic of Cancer; but neither washed out the stain of years he lived in that land of “mists and mellow fruitfulness,” as Frances in Panic Spring recalls her time in England. She does not quote Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” with any of the poet’s quiet joy. Probably echoing Durrell’s own dissatisfaction, she recalls a dismal time which went from an intellectually sterile life as a country parson’s daughter to the dismally penny pinching life in bohemian London. She lives, during the course of the novel, on the privately owned island of Maphrodaphne (actually the name of a Greek wine). With her are the owner of the island, Kostos Rumanades, and four others who for their own reasons have sought and found a sanctuary, which they know cannot be permanent. For nothing is permanent: places change as do people. And change, or perhaps instability, is an essential part of Durrell’s fictive and poetic world, the heraldic world that changes shape but always leads back to archetypes.
The foreigners have been gathered to this island by the functionary Christos, who has been commissioned by Kostos Rumanades, a wealthy and lonely financier, to encourage interesting people to come live on his largesse. The similarity to Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is obviously intentional, the establishment of a metaphor in which one powerful man is contrasted with another. So without intention, purely serendipitously, these five are gathered. Along with Frances are: Gordon, who accepts what comes to him; Walsh, who fled England when his wife died; Fonvisin, a Russian medical doctor, who has retreated from his profession; and Marlow, a teacher who has come not only to hate his job but his pupils. Like Conway in Lost Horizon, they fell without intent into an idyll, which as much as they wanted it to be a world without end knew it would end. End it did : on the night of the going away party for Frances, the first to find paradise tenuous. A horrific storm battered the island and Villa Pothetos, the house Kostos Rumanades built for a woman he adored, foreshadowing the death of the old man rather dramatically and blatantly. Durrell had yet to develop subtlety.
But much that would later inhabit and characterize his fictive world is already in place though immature as befits the writing of one so young. At least that’s what I think; obviously, Faber and Faber found much of worth in it. And Miller said the novel couldn’t be as bad as Durrell thought his slight romance. His disparagement of England would continue, as would his rhapsodic love of Greece:
Voices fluent with necessity beseeched, cajoled, insisted. Scarves danced and swayed, profuse with colour. The heavy dresses twirled and snapped at their ankles, instinct with a disturbing life. Heavy and sickening, the smell of garlic rose on the air. Gordon, head and brown shoulders above them all, laughed in the fresh laughing faces of the women, and shouted for them to make way. (9)
Marlow in his black suit is like a foreign insect, a cipher in the midst of color. He will gradually become part of the group of five, but never belong with the peasants as does Gordon, who is comfortable being nearly naked. Slowly, Marlow evolves: to cut the legs off trousers, to swim naked; but never does he lose what Durrell called his “Northern reserve”.
Durrell has once again looked into the lives of people isolated from the general community. Perhaps, probably actually, he has the colonial’s separation from the colonized. In which case, post-colonial theorists may correctly look at him from a loftier critical culture than I inhabit. And Durrell’s separation occurred not only because of his position within a privileged minority or because he had money in a poor community. But also because he lost his first home and family at the age of twelve, when he was sent “home” to public school. And also because he had great talent, a quick wit, and did not, as my mother would have said, suffer fools gladly. In my own words: he had a very low threshold for bullshit. What is key to understanding both Durrell and his small band of exiles is their basic similarity: all, including Durrell, refuse to compromise with the culture of Pudding Island and happily accept, not Durrell in this case, what other port is offered them.
They find themselves in a removed and idyllic place. Freed from the usual problems of work and routine, though echoes from the past and rumblings from the future are constant. The similarity to Lost Horizon, James Hilton’s famous between the wars novel, is not a mere coincidence. Just as did Hilton, so did Durrell, and Miller as well, consider that they were living in a fragile idyll. In fact, when the Durrell’s visited Miller and his friends in Paris in 1937, they were so taken with the film that they all saw it at least three or four times. No evidence indicates they had read the novel Hilton published in 1933, but similarities with Panic Spring are surely more than coincidental.
To begin with Hilton’s novel: after effecting the evacuation of some thirty members of the European community of Baksul in China in the middle of a revolution, John Conway and three others are hijacked by an Asian pilot and taken into Tibet. There they become guests at the lamasery Shangri-La. With Conway are another member of the diplomatic corps (who becomes his brother in the film), a woman missionary (who becomes a blond floosy in the film), an American fleeing prosecution, and in the film a quite unnecessary archaeologist. All but the young diplomat wish to stay, and Conway is to become the high lama and like the others in Shangri-la live hundreds of years in peaceful meditation. He leaves to assist the younger man escape with a seemingly young Asian woman (she ages immediately on leaving), and the novelist leaves us wondering if Conway returned to Shangri-la. In the film he returns to paradise and to the woman he saw swimming in the nude.
Such is the narrative skeleton, but the novel is told third hand, leaving us time and place to wonder and doubt, to engage us as readers. What both film and novel share is the essence of reflections between the wars, especially in the thirties. Conway had been the most gifted man of his generation at Oxford, thought by all surely to ascend to the highest level in whatever endeavor he chose: politics, literature, academia. His generation, though, was the one that fought the war to end all wars, and he was utterly changed:
He had a most exciting university career—until the war broke out. Rowing
Blue and a leading light at the Union, and prizeman for this, that, and
the other—also I reckon him the best amateur pianist I ever heard.
Amazingly many-sided fellow, the kind, one feels, that Jowett would
have tipped for a future premier. Yet, in point of fact, one never heard
much of him after those Oxford days. Of course the war cut into his career.
He was very young and I gather he went through most of it. (12)
Later, Conway would discuss his war years with the High Lama as typical of the event: “I was excited and suicidal and scared and reckless and sometimes in a tearing rage—like a few million others in fact” (143). The war left him exhausted in passions, which was for him the beginning of wisdom—and was also the basis of belief at Shangri-la.
Hilton’s Conway is what Robert Graves had earlier described in himself as his “war neurasthenia” commonly called shell shock. Perhaps, Hilton’s patriotism kept him from being so damning. After all, he did write Good-Bye Mister Chips, which verges on the jingoistic. For whatever reason, Durrell’s view of the past war in Panic Spring is much more exacting than Hilton’s, as he describes his character Marlowe when he can no longer even tolerate his students:
But the war had not altered him, it had marked him. Where its other victims had been made a present of medals or amputations, or a mangle
Of limbs, to Marlowe, as to many others, it had left the legacy of a wrecked
nervous system. The mere slit of shrapnel across his ribs had been, as it were, complimentary. (18-19)
Durrell, of course, had read Graves and would have been quite in agreement with Graves’s rejection of England, as he wrote about it in Good-Bye To All That. However, having published Panic Spring ten years after Graves published Good-Bye To All That, Durrell can see as Graves could not the results of what had happened at the Versailles Treaty. The world was one again set on an inevitable course of conflagration. In Lost Horizon, Chang, a ranking resident of Shangri-la responds to Conway’s concern about the absence of information about current affairs because all newspapers and periodicals are out of date. To which his guide replies: “Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940” (92). Hilton here accurately brackets what we now call the between the war years and causes me to wonder if the much written about escape from the reality of World War I was also a desire to avoid seeing what was hurtling towards them. //Post and pre-war jitters, though clumsy, may be a more apt term than the time between the wars. This extended unease will appear and be more sharply etched in The Black Book. There, Durrell will, momentarily, abandon his concern with being a financially successful author. Later, he and Miller will disagree about his persistence in writing to make money to buy baby a new pair of shoes.
In The Black Book, Durrell continues to confine his attention to a small group of people not only isolated from the general population but existing with a quite different morality from them. Probably, his identifying with a small, isolated group was imprinted on him quite early in the India of the Raj. That both he and his brother, Gerald, lived complexly rich lives is evidenced by their writings and by the lives annotated by their biographers. Yet in their tellings of the self, their writings, they return obsessively to the isolated group, as Gerald did in Filets of Plaice. He is in West Africa at the home of his friend, the District Officer, who is to entertain the District Commissioner. Although Gerald Durrell and the Africans in his employ were very familiar, he knew how he had to behave in public. Ordering a drink from his own factotum, he said:
‘Whiskey and water.’ I said, adopting the cold attitude that so many
people used towards their servants. I felt coming from Nigeria the D.C.
appreciate my falling into the right sort of British habits. (132)
His recognition of both the force and fragility of the Empire appears uneasily in this narrative, for even though he and the other Europeans are constantly cared for and served by Africans, he distinguishes himself from the typical colonial for whom the Africans are essentially invisible. Brother Lawrence was just as light hearted, though not as self-conscious, in Panic Spring.
But in The Black Book, Durrell would pit his small group against the members of a culture he called “the English death”. That they would not win the struggle was perhaps inevitable, if they chose to continue living in England. Durrell’s characters do except for the narrator who escapes to a Greek island. And so the occasion for the narrator to write, as well as the story of bohemian London resonates with Durrell’s own life, as was also true for Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring. Yet The Black Book is important in itself as a literary work while the other two novels only matter as bits of juvenalia by a writer whose writings would stain the culture—stain in the good sense as dyes are used to stain, to mark permanently the medium: cloth for stains, culture for Durrell. What happened was not just escaping to Corfu or Panic Spring would have been a better novel. What happened was the appearance in Corfu into the hands of twenty-three year old Lawrence Durrell Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. In a letter he wrote to Miller as soon as he read Tropic of Cancer he compared it with all that had come before, even Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence:
Tropic is something they’ve been trying to do since the war. It’s the
the final copy of all those feeble, smudgy rough drafts—Chatterly, Ulysses, Tarr etc. It not only goes back, but (which none of them have done) goes forward as well.
It finds its way out of the latrines at last. Funny that no one
should have thought of slipping out via the pan during a flush, instead of
crowding the door. (2
And so began the friendship of Miller and Durrell. Through success and failure, difference in views of life, marriage, children, and war, the friendship would continue. But that is not really my concern, especially since it has been documented and discussed often. My concern here is the “flush”.
As I found, almost twenty years after Durrell, Tropic of Cancer may be many things, but as to arousing sexual desire, it is no Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which at the time I hadn’t read. It’s not even a God’s Little Acre, which at the time I had read in the privacy of my family’s bathroom, between flushes. But Tropic of Cancer came into my hands much as it did into Durrell’s. I was in an all-male boarding school when Miller’s book, smuggled into the United States from France by a friend’s uncle, was passed around. Not being aroused by Miller’s descriptions and being far less troubled by descriptions of genitalia and intercourse than the United States Customs Office, I passed the book on almost unread. My literary tastes had only recently gone beyond the works of Dumas and Sabatini, which were available in the library in my junior high in Omar, West Virginia. Conrad’s Lord Jim and Shakespeare’s Hamlet were my breakthrough works; so, unlike Durrell, I had no wealth of literary experience that could permit me to see the importance of Tropic of Cancer, and I certainly had never written a novel, though a few years earlier I had won a $10.00 prize for an essay “Why My Father Should Work Safely,” which was published in the mining company’s news letter.
Durrell’s fevered response to Tropic of Cancer came about, I think, because of a very deep dilemma: a distaste bordering on the obsessive for all things English and a desire to succeed in that culture. His first two novels had accepted the guidance of such modern writers as Lawrence yet strove as well to be popular in the manner of J.B. Priestly. I feel his quandary: Shax and Conrad had shown me the limitations of Dumas and Sabatini, but no one had yet kicked me into my own time. That was left for Durrell to do many years later; until then, I was unknowingly preparing myself to understand him.
But his understanding of Miller was immediate. Unlike me, he wasn’t disappointed because it wasn’t smut. In time, in 1961 actually, the United States also decided that Tropic of Cancer is not smut. Pressed into action by the Grove Press publication, various courts in the country decided, essentially, that the book did not arouse “prurient” desires, even thought it was frequently offensive in language and episodes. Durrell could have told them that in 1934, and I could have told then in 1953 that even sexually denied and obsessed young men were not aroused by anything in the book. For instance, here is a passage that would have offended my mother, though perhaps not my grandmother who once said about a young woman who became pregnant without benefit of marriage: “A poor girl has to get her baby anyway she can”. My mother lived in the same world, but was a great deal tidier in acknowledging it. Here is a telling passage from Tropic of Cancer, one that will without doubt arouse at least revulsion in most “normal adults,” to use a term that was a touchstone in the court cases:
“What I’m getting at is that moment when, he says, he got down on
his knees and with those two skinny fingers of his he spread her cunt open.
You remember that? He says she was sitting there with her legs dangling
over the arms of the chair and suddenly, he says, he got an inspiration. This
was after he had given her a couple of lays already . . . after he had made
that little spiel about Matisse. He gets down on his knees—and get this!—
and with his two fingers . . . just the tips of them, mind you . . . he opens the little petals . . . squish-squish . . . just like that. A sticky little sound . . .
almost inaudible. Squish-squish! Jesus, I’ve been hearing it all night long.” (125)
Here, then, is what Durrell saw. Miller had written about sex without even giving a nod to the traditional ideals that considered sex as the mingling of two souls (never considering the possibility of more than two though at least four cavorted in the unconscious). Although his passion (even love) for June, the only begetter of the novel, underlies it, never does even that idea color the narrative. Even more than Hemingway, Miller avoids the big words: love, honor. He could not, for instance, understand why George Orwell would go to Spain to fight on the side of the loyalists. And in all his relationships with women, he never seemed even concerned if they considered him a resource, as did his last wife. After she left him, she opened a Henry Miller museum and bar in her native Tokyo, stocking it with items of Miller.
Durrell would also have been drawn to the nature of Miller’s narrative: absolutely no devotion to reasonable and believable progression of events. Aristotle’s Unity of Time, that fictive or dramatic action should closely match the real time of an event, has gone out in the flush. Gone as well is Aristotle’s adherence to action that proceeds from cause to effect. What Durrell saw was what he himself had, in a timid way, been approaching: a narrative bound neither by time nor a reasonable reality. In short, the Heraldic reality or Universe he envisioned as a sea in which artists swim. In this reality, physical presence and emotions exist in easy consort with the content of the unconscious. Intentionality as well as accident don’t exist; all that is simply exists. In the fictive or visual presentation of this world, experience is freed from memory and expectation, as Durrell indicates:
I have discovered that the idea of duration is false. We have invented it
as a philosophic jack-up to idea of physical disintegration. THERE IS ONLY
SPACE. A solid object has only three dimensions. Time, that old appendix,
I’ve lopped off. So it needs a new attitude. An attitude without memory. A
spacial existence in terms of the paper I’m writing on at the moment. (19)
Earlier, Durrell had asked Miller for a definition of Surrealism. The existing letters from Miller do not contain the definition. If they did, that definition would surely be close to what Durrell wrote in the above letter. A writer of his time and culture, Durrell then, and forever after, was attuned to what most informed them. Most telling for the writer Durrell was and always would be is his response to reading Anais Nin’s House of Incest:
I have finished House of Incest at last. What a silly title, but I like it,
In spite of the technique. It’s the first book in this mode that I’ve read that
Is alive. In spite of the method. Dream minus reality etc. (38)
In “Zero and Asylum in the Snow” Durrell would himself write in such a mode. But of course that was after he and his wife Nancy had spent time with Miller, Nin, et.
al. in Paris. His own mode was to find the idea within the experience. Dream plus reality.
By all accounts, mainly her own, Anais Nin could bring even St. Simon Stylities down off his perch. In her diary from this time, she observed that Durrell was the best writer of them all. I agree. She was what would now be called a celebrity. An advocate of advanced and experimental art and thought, she was never simply confined to a movement, though she shared a passion for the outre’ with the Surrealists, always for them, a central understanding. The Surrealists, among many unable to accept what they saw as a culture driven by greed and religious perfidy, rejected in their works and lives the benison of ideals as a reason for ones actions, either venal or altruistic. For the European Surrealists, political activity in the cause of Socialism was necessary. Miller objected, finding only anarchy a possible expression of his self, and I think he would have held to the view that anarchists subscribe to a state, or any unit, without a central controlling body or even concept; he was in fact committed to writing without concern for the effect his writing had outside itself. Durrell at this time, and frequently throughout his life, tried on ways of being, and in his enquiry (and admiration for Miller) probably looked into anarchy. But to think of him as a Western liberal or even someone with leftist leanings is a mistake. When I visited with him in 1986, he told me that since his brother Gerald had been invited to do research in a huge wildlife refuge in Siberia that he had allowed his own works to be translated into Russian and distributed in Russia: “I don’t want to cause him any difficulties”. To read Durrell’s beliefs based only on any single act is a mistake: he would always act in support of friends rather than ignore their needs because of a contradiction in beliefs. And he would always be a writer who wanted to be of his time and be successful: he was committed to his art and craft and wanted to make his living by it. Of the three, Nin was most aware of who she was and what she was doing. Nin was embarking on what I once heard a devotee call “a spiritual journey”. That journey passed through the beds of a great many men. Durrell was probably one.//
So into the mélange of affirmation and rejection, of experiment and accomplishment, the budding writer Lawrence Durrell brought his talent and his desire to be a writer who mattered and would matter once that talent got a good shaking up by Miller and The Tropic of Cancer. The Black Book must have come in a rush of quite imitative energy, then grown through revision, as both he and Alfred Perles acknowledge:
[end December? 1936] Durrell to Miller: The Black Book by the way is not
bad, unless you’re extra fastidious. I’ve revived it. Just rewriting it: trying
to demillerise it as I go along. (35)
Alfred Perles: Larry had arrived in Paris with the typescript of his Black Book in his pocket It was the first work of importance, completely drenched in the Tropic of Cancer. By this I do not mean that the Black Book is in any way
derivative from Miller’s writings. Of course, Larry admired Henry, and his
spirit was receptive to the powerful work; but his own literary personality
was already formed and intact when the Tropic made its impact on him.
But Henry’s influence, which is discernible on nearly every page of the
Black Book, only stabilized Larry in his own trend; his artistry owed nothing
to Miller. If Henry did breathe into his nostrils, it was into nostrils of an
already consummate artist that he breathed: for good measure, as it were.
(14)//
What then did Durrell find in Tropic of Cancer? Clearly, he had already established his literary landscape as one inhabited by a small group, by taste or tastelessness necessarily separated from the general public. He had displayed an interest, obsessive, with behavior not likely to earn him a place in the libraries of Bournemouth hotels (such as the embalming scene in Panic Spring).
He had not gone beyond the bedroom door that Victorian writers kept closed, and barely glanced inside in The Black Book; for like Miller he was not concerned with the prurient. Well, maybe he was somewhat concerned with literature that can arouse, as in this scene from The Black Book:
Under my mouth a rouged vagina speaking a barbaric laughter and nibbling
my tongue. It is all warm and raw: a spiritual autumn with just that scent of
corruption, that much death in it to make it palatable. A meal of game well-
hung pig-scented and tangy. Such as venison, more delicate than the gums
of babies or little fishes. (65)
Some may find this merely offensive, not prurient smut. Quel dommage, as the French would say.
So, then, there is another value of Tropic of Cancer for Durrell. Here, I think, is the key to Miller’s importance. Tropic of Cancer was important to Durrell as a concept, perhaps as what we now call conceptual art: idea matters more than an artful execution. In an early letter (probably September of 1933), Durrell wrote to Miller: “Ben Jonson would have said you lack’d art, or some such damn silly thing” (4). That Jonson made the comment about Shax puts Miller, for Durrell, among those who matter most. But Miller lacked art intentionally, as Perles seemed to reflect when he wrote: “Miller’s influence on Durrell has never quite worn off and is still discernible, though only faintly, in the over polished Alexandrian Quartet (sic.)” (10).
Understanding how Miller midwifed The Black Book, coalescing for Durrell his own surrealist thought and practice, as cited above in Durrell’s letter and freeing him to view “the English Death” still leaves for me an essential mystery: why did Eliot the most bank clerkly of Englishmen like The Black Book. I asked Larry, who said: “He saw it for what it is. The story of a religious nervous breakdown”. BEZINGA! Here, then, is The Waste Land on the pages, so to speak, on which Durrell wrote The Black Book. Considering that neither Eliot nor Durrell was conventionally religious at the time they wrote these works, “religious” may be understood as the source of belief, the answer to life’s mysteries. For Eliot more so than for Durrell, Western culture had been the source; but yet Durrell had kept a tenuous hold on its framework: family and that hostage to fortune, belief that ideals inform the physical world. What living through World War 1 did to shake Eliot loose, England with its seasons of melancholy and its dead souls (in his view) shook Durrell. He did need, however, Henry Miller to bring all into focus; then he went where Miller never could, into a fictive world of conditional values and truths.
The Black Book tells of the English Death through the inhabitants of the Regina Hotel, a mausoleum in which dead beliefs spend limbo. As much as in Alexandria, the inhabitants are the flora and fauna of this place, this London.
Gathered here are those who have failed in all other places; and the newest entry, the self-styled Lawrence Lucifer, is to tell of their deaths and of his. On assuming his place in a room previously occupied by the melodramatic self-styled Death Gregory, our narrator finds Gregory’s memoir, The Black Book, which tells of loves and friendships that failed because they lacked meaning, in the sense that sacred beliefs traditionally endowed. Lawrence’s narrative which engulfs Gregory’s parallels, contradicts, criticizes and tells much the same story, though with less hope. In both, the inhabitants are left to confront life without the guidance of idealism, to founder. Chamberlin admits his homosexuality but seems unsure what to do with it, as indicated in his attempt to seduce our narrator: “Look, do you think it would damage our relationship if I sucked you off?” (172)
The narrative often seems a vehicle for Durrell’s observations on life and death, especially the English and often overwhelms the story of the flora and fauna:
What it cost me to maintain this terrible equilibrium, to become
responsible only to myself for I am—that is not the important thing.
The important thing is this: if I succeed, and I will succeed, then I shall
become, in a sense the first Englishman. I tell you this in confidence,
because afterward, when the great struggle is over, and the whole
psyche of our nation—our world—is thrown back into gear—there will
be plenty of time for understanding, analysis, wondering. (141).
As affected as this reads, it has resonance against the despair which has driven Gregory to this mausoleum where people also have the leisure to preen their neuroses. These were people who had come of age between the wars and many, such as Durrell and Gregory, sustained a lifestyle that allowed for inquiry into the nature of things. In the case of Gregory and Lawrence (and we must remember that Durrell’s full name is Lawrence George Durrell, probably a play on the initials), these inquiries seem over wrought, but the times were on the verge of cataclysm, and they knew a retelling of the war to end all wars was slouching out of the continent. They were in a paused time. Unable to accept the beliefs of the past and having no others, they unconsciously or in Lawrence’s hyper awareness, spin in place. The result is devastating:
I smile because I can feel nothing. I suspend judgment on everything
because so little exists. I am strangled by the days that pass through me, by
by the human beings I am forced to meet. Nothing, nothing across those
acres of snow and ice, this arctic season, except occasional rages,
occasional fits of weeping. (231)
Here in a nutshell is the English Death as lived by an observant and articulate man. Here is the “religious nervous breakdown”. Here is Eliot’s Fisher King expecting nothing more than castration.
Yet woven through this narrative of histrionic despair are signs of life and thought on which to build. With an enthusiasm that smacks of Shaw, Durrell presents the working class janitor of The Regina as a counter to the over thinking residents, who lost in rather effete despair seem unable to enjoy life without its being sauced with self-absorbed despair. Morgan, on the other hand, accepts what life offers him and speaks of that life without the cliche passing as refinement of the residents. Here, he tells Lawrence of a sexual experience in such a straight forward manner as to shock our narrator into a momentary epiphany. A woman had come into the boiler room with nothing under her dress and said: “Do you want it, Mister Morgan?” He did and found her “fruity,” a more direct and telling of reality statement than we have heard from anyone else in this novel, as Lawrence himself understands:
From this epic to the minor myth of Gregory is a step that seems
unbridgeable, to me at any rate. Morgan at one uncouth jump reaches beyond the boundaries of our idealism, our dilute passion, our effect aesthetic. I am helpless to do anything but move the green bishop to a
new paragraph. Helpless. (61)
This sense of awe with the simple life of the working class will not endure in Durrell’s writing, as is proven by his repeating Morgan’s declaration of love: “
“Marriage?” he says, bending down to where we sit on the sofa (he
pronounces it “merritch”), “well, I always said it’s not for me, sir, but
if she wants it—well, I don’t want to disappoint her.” Then, leaning down, ever more confidentially, over me, he beams like a lighthouse and whispers,
“She’s that good, sir, I could eat ‘er shit, sir.” (230)
About twenty years later, Durrell has another lower class character, named Cade, repeat Morgan’s praise of a woman: “She was so fine, sor, that I could eat her shit”. But Cade is not a salt of the earth laborer. He is the servant of the novelist Blanford, had been his batsman during World War 2, and had stayed on as his man servant. Cade now avoids sex and most pleasures, dislikes foreigners, and secrets away manuscript pages written by his master. Venal within a puritanical self, he has none of the Romantics’ noble laborer. But then Durrell had not been cottaged with Dorothy Wordsworth for eight. He had been in the mix of things and had his ideals shaken out a good deal.
The shaking out was, clearly, written of in The Black Book, with Morgan as the fictive, though unaware, messenger who came “to tell him all”.
Actually, though, Morgan does for Lawrence what Miller did for Durrell: remind him that life will always trump ideals—if those ideals cannot exist in the realm of experience, especially the Heraldic experience. There the archetype meets physical reality, and though we may deny its power, the Heraldic will exert its force and presence, bringing us face to face with what we would deny. In brief, Miller brought Durrell Surrealism in a fictive package.
Miller and Durrell much preferred the early Surrealists to later ones, ones for whom Socialism and communism were essential to their definition of the movement. Before a movement occurred, there was the birth of the idea of surrealism in the Program Notes by Apollinaire to Parade, a ballet performed in Paris by Dagliev’s Ballet Ruse with music by Eric Satie, book by Jean Cocteau, set, curtain, and costumes by Pablo Picasso, choreography by Leonide Massine. The piece seems to have had its origin in Satie’s piano piece “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear,” which he wrote in reply to Debussy’s comment that his music lacked form. He wrote four, not three, pieces. For the first time, the word Surrealism occurs in Apollinaire’s Program Notes:
This new alliance—I say new, because until now scenery and costumes
Were linked only by factitious bonds—has given rise in Parade, to a kind
Of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole
series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today
and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring
about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joy-
fullness, for it is only natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific
and industrial progress.
Following this statement, Apollinaire placed Picasso’s art central to the accomplishment of Parade, which he called “This realism—or this cubism” and wrote that for Picasso in Parade “the aim is, above all, to express reality”. Picasso’s designs in Parade are consistent with cubist practice: finding form within the items depicted and expressing a reality that accepts dream and the unconscious as informing that reality.
Later Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton would continue this concept in their own creations, and Breton would amplify Apollinaire’s statements in the first Surrealist Manifesto. For these artists, and for Cocteau as well, Freud’s theory of dreams was central. The First Manifesto of Surrealism asserts the importance of Freud’s view in which there are “strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface”. Though not specifically mentioned these “forces” are the latent content of dreams, images that have been repressed into the unconscious by the waking mind. For Breton, these “forces” were in opposition to logic, superstition, convention, fixed methods. The artist was not to be “at the mercy of memory”. So freed, the artist could stop the “conscious rhythm” of thought from prevailing over the material. Breton concludes the manifesto:
SURREALISM, noun, masc. Pure psychological automatism by which it is
Intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of
thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and
outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations.
Though Miller and Durrell discuss the importance of Surrealism and Miller even termed Durrell an “English Surrealist,” quite clearly neither abandoned themselves to automatic writing.
What Miller and Durrell did was to write “outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations”. And they, as much as possible, practiced the associative narrative implied by both Freud’s theory of dreams and by such surrealist’s works as la chien andalous . This film was the joint effort of Artaud, Brunel, and Dali. The images are dreamlike; the narrative is associative rather than episodic or linear: one image or act is associated with another in a manner neither reasonable nor predictable.
Durrell’s narrative, written without knowledge of the Surrealists, nevertheless, effects their ideas of narrative. He does not, however, abandon what he called reality, the inescapable physical world with its light and dark, smooth and rough. Instead, he asserts that the world above and the world below are connected. Though the heraldic reality encompasses the whole, our access to it is through the physical world. What he does in his narrative of the physical world is to abandon the belief that reason and predictability, those bugaboos of Aristotle, control our lives. Accident reigns: a chance meeting between Gregory and Gracie changes his life, mainly because he holds to old Aristotle’s ways. Once he admits Gracie to his life, Gregory must let her develop into a suitable mate and accept that ultimate corner stone of western culture: marriage. Though he doesn’t marry her, Lawrence equally views Hilda as a necessary expression of his culture. Miller does otherwise and lets whores be whores and counts himself lucky if he doesn’t have to pay them. Miller, it seems, held loosely to the idea that neither intentionality nor accident have merit; what is is. Durrell never seems so inclined, even when he earlier tried to eliminate time with its chronological imperative. Later, in The Alexandria Quartet he would write his work as three parts space and one part time.
So, encompassing, or engulfing, these tales of necessity is the larger narrative structure in which Unity of Time is irrelevant because time itself has lost its linear force. I must, since irreverence is my lot, introduce a dissenting voice, that of Archy, the giant cockroach created by Don Marquis. Being the reincarnated spirit of a vers libre poet, Archy is a wise at witty commentator on the passing scene. In one of his maxims, he observed: “old doc einstein has/abolished time but they/haven t go the news at/sing sing yet (43). Durrell interrupts his narrative when a linear force attempts control. I am assuming here that even Durrell found characters and events could stubbornly resist his intentions. At times, he interrupts his narrative with meditations on other writers: Sappho, Shakespeare, Skelton, Shelley, Keats, Eliot, Pound. Sometimes, as Eliot did in The Waste Land, Durrell will quote, more often allude, to a work and so stop the narrative while the reader fills in the missing connection. The technique is a modernist one, to be seen as essential to visual and verbal arts. Then at times, Gregory will go back to his boyhood in Tibet, as Durrell recreates his own past.
be seen as essential to visual and the verbal arts. Then at times, Gregory will go back to his boyhood in Tibet, as Durrell recreates his own past.
The central structure Durrell uses, though, are layered fictive experiences, realities if you will: Gregory’s text about the Regina Hotel exists within Lawrence’s text about the Regina hotel which itself exists in the narrative present of Lawrence’s life on a Greek island. In this passage, Durrell not only interrupts the narrative(s) by shifting times and locales but by recalling boththe English Death, the triple narratives, and the myths that drive them:
I open a book and see you standing there, like a whipped bitch among the apple trees. It is not good enough, my beautiful id. On the
title page there is Sappho meditating under the terrible eyeballs of the
night sky, the sea curling away under the white rock, the holly trembling
At the moon, the silver riders galloping way toward Crete. Turn your face to sea wall, and listen to the noisy lungs of the water under the cliffs. The moon crawling across the warm tiles, and the whole Greek world
gathered in a single knot of agony in the left breast. The night moving one way and the sea another, and the body torn in two by them. Or is it Gracie
In her English room going blind as a collie among the starched collars? Gracie and Sappho sharing the last dazzling jump into history. The water
closing. The tactless sea in many husbands of silver treading the white
meat under the cliffs, breathing among the statues and the chorus.
Good-by (134)
Though Durrell was not aware of the Surrealists when he wrote The Black Book, this paragraph is clearly Surrealist in its mixing of times, its images that combine reality and dream. It does, however, not abandon myth and history; but then neither did Freud, whose inquiries and theories informed at the most basic of levels both the Surrealists and the young Durrell. As the topic of the paragraph, the id, makes clear, Durrell was comfortable with Freud’s views. Speaking here, Lawrence refers to that part of the self that is primitive and pleasure seeking, likely to get into trouble without the guidance and control of the ego, which probably has laid the lash to the poor bitch. He makes no mention in The Black Book of the super ego with its core of internalized standards and morality, which as I remember from undergraduate arguments some identify with God. Durrell’s deities world appear more complexly later.
Though the rhapsodic mode of this paragraph resembles passages in Tropic of Cancer, its source could just as easily be Durrell’s rhapsodic delight at his life at this time: he was hearing the sound of his own voice for the first time in a place whose beauty stunned him, and he was with the woman he loved. At least, those are the messages of The Black Book. Durrell will later have a female character say later that there are two things a man can do with a woman: love her or turn her into literature. Perhaps, Durrell did both, at least momentarily, when he wrote The Black Book. His apostrophe to her cunt, her anus, her womb, all parts of her body leads him to a long rhapsody that begins:
Not words but a vocabulary which goes through us both like the sea, devouring. A nameless, paralyzed singing in the backbone. An interior
mass, blacker than sacrilege. A dancing of fibers along the skin, a new
action, a theme as fresh as seed, an agony, a revenge, a universe! (246)
As I reflected early in this chapter, Larry and Nancy had difficulties (serious ones according to biographies), yet I do not think a mere fuck could have so transported him. It had to be a really good fuck, the sign of a really good love. And I hope his readers can provide documentary proof from their own experience.
The world they live in, he places squarely between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn:
In spite of the immense sea, steering up and down, attacking, feinting,
wheeling its range of colors under the house which stands like a white
ark on the black rock. Within the thirtieth parallels North and South of
the Equator like a huge hummingbird ultramarine to the south of lat. 30
s. a deep swollen indigo. (242)
As my scientist friend John Dickey made note, Durrell made a common, layman’s mistake with the latitudes:
Perhaps he was referring to the tropical regions, which lie between the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn at 23.5 degrees north and south of the equator. These are the northernmost and southernmost latitudes that experience the sun directly overhead on the solstices, approximately June 22 for the northern hemisphere and December 22 for the southern. At higher latitudes the Sun is never directly overhead. People (particularly promoters of Floridian tourism) sometimes think of the tropical zone as lying between thirty degrees north and south, but this is not correct.
Be that as it may.
Yet for Durrell, here was his opportunity to go beyond his narrative to praise both Miller and Greece. He would never forget either. But soon he would leave Corfu, following the blue south, ahead of the advancing German army. This part of the idyll was ending.
